Many book artists explore current social and political issues through their work. The Rollins Book Art Collection is intentionally an interdisciplinary teaching collection, directly supporting the College’s curriculum and its long tradition of liberal education. The purpose of the collection is to use art as a medium through which students can better understand multifaceted issues — global politics, economies, cultures; the tensions around social structures and marginalized populations; conflicts between human development and the environment; art as a concept, expression, and a communication tool; and other contemporary issues that students will encounter in their coursework and everyday lives.
The Rollins Book Art Collection is supported by a close collaboration between three entities on campus — The Department of Art & Art History, the Rollins Museum of Art, and the Olin Library — and is guided by an advisory board that includes students, staff, and faculty from across our campus community. It can be accessed in the Rollins College Archives and Special Collections reading room of Olin Library. The collection is also often on display in exhibitions (see a list below).
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Maybe Only the Caged Bird Will Sing
Elsi Vassdal Ellis
"This edition was not planned or designed in advance but emerged during productive play time to reacquaint myself with my Vandercook 4 while using up leftover materials in the studio. Using mounted fiberglass table mats the printing began by laying down patterns front and back on three stacks of press sheets. Searching through my cuts, dingbats, and ornaments I chose the theme of birds. Lifestyle Crafts inks (light blue and royal blue) were used to print blue ink on blue paper as a continuation of a monochrome series begun in 2012. Room was left for the insertion of text generated from articles saved from The Scientist, Discover, Smithsonian, and The Week. The text highlights the dangers faced by birds as well as survival skills. There are two barrel-roll signatures designed to take advantage of artwork width and potential, and for a binding challenge. No new materials were purchased for this edition as part of my second series, also begun in 2012: 'Waste Not, Want Not.'" — Elsi Vassdal Ellis
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En Stereo
Ry McCullough
En Stereo is a swirling dialogue about the balance between domestic life and existential uncertainty. While examining one reality, the reader is presented with parallel strands of streaming conversations that exist within the experience. Collective as well as singularly isolated, the individuals voice serves as a component to the whole sound. Characters, O and X, discuss the fumbling confusion of the everyday, an ominous column of smoke rises in the distance and a wanderer, E, draws nearer.
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Audibility/Audibilidad
Carrie Ann Plank
Three artists discuss the sound of the state of being in Havana, Cuba, in three languages, visual and written. None of these languages are translations, but rather individual investigations of the same concept. The four subjects, Buscar (to search), Esperar (to wait), Resolver (to solve problems) and Querer (to want) are common in the Cuban vernacular. Artist proof was printed at the Taller Experimental de Gráfica de la Habana and the Taller de Serigrafía René Portocarerro in April, 2017. All imagery by Carrie Ann Plank. Text by Hanoi Pérez and Megan Adie. Bound with the assistance of Yerandee González Durán. Edition completed in San Francisco, 2018. Bound and printed by the artists with the assistance of Chris Rolik and Keisha Mrotek.
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(w)hole: A Life in Parts
Miriam Schaer
(w)hole: A Life in Parts is Miriam Schaer’s exploration her mother Ida’s decline into dementia before Ida's death. A visual essay on how we care for our aging parents when they are unable to care for themselves. (w)hole: A Life in Parts uses Schaer’s original writing, photography and collage.
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A Room Inside
Trine Søndergaard
"Everyone carries an empty room inside,” Franz Kafka wrote in his diary. We all carry something invisible that no one else fully understands. Perhaps even we ourselves do not. Emphasising a private space is a typical practice of Danish camera based visual artist Trine Søndergaard (1972), acclaimed for her silent, yet powerful imagery. A Room Inside presents selected works from the period 2013-2017. Portraits, landscapes and reflections interspersed. They encompass and address themes such as existence, grief, history and transition.
The book was chosen as one of the Books of the year by the Danish Association of Bookcraft.
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Pist Protta 79
Space Poetry
"With pencil on paper the mind explores the forms and structures through the line drawing them. That goes for most of the content in this issue of Pist Protta.
"It may be that the action of using the line to take notes by hand aids understanding and rememberance. I had that experience once when I tried to identify some plants collected in Italy where I am not familiar with the flora. To facilitate the comparisons, I drew all the plants in contour on a few sheets of paper — and during that process the forms of the plants became much easier to understand and recognize.
"Line literally means 'a linen thread,' and the sheer beauty of interweaving lines creates a texture that is close to both text and textile. It might work in at least two ways: that the lines create a meshwork or that the line is an analytic tool in understanding how a specific textile or other thing is made." — Åse Eg Jørgensen
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Art of the Lie
Various Artists
"Art of the Lie" features a collection of nine book artists’ contributions of varying editions on the theme of untruthfulness. The complete set features a “Pack of Lies” 56-card deck in a collector’s box. “Pack of Lies” was an edition of 65 card decks that included contributions from 25 participating artists in designated suits (stars=types of lies, arrows=Dantean circles, bangs=types of fallacies, question marks=historical) with nods to transformation, training, and flashcard decks. Book artist individual contributions for "Art of the Lie" include: "Many Sides" by Kristin Leigh Adolfson (edition 25), "Essay upon the Art of Political lying, excerpts from Jonathan Swift" by Bonnie Bernstein (edition 20), "Parts" by Dean Dass (edition 10), excerpts from "The Passionate Pilgrim, William Shakespeare" by Richard Cappuccio (edition 20), "White Privilege Likes" by Lyall Harris (edition 20), "Liar’s Log" by Nancy Kober (edition 14), "Numbers Don’t Lie" by Kevin McFadden (edition 25), "Same Side" by Garrett Queen (edition 25), "The Age of Euphemism, excerpts from Kevin Young’s Bunk" by Kevin McFadden, et al. (edition 25).
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Landscapes of the Late Anthropocene
Philip Zimmermann
Zimmermann combined three different interests to make a compelling book about climate change – the rising sea levels, airport control towers, and language.
"Due to a general public concern about climate change, most people have become aware of the term 'anthropocene.' It’s a word relating to or denoting the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment. For the last two years I have been thinking about a way to make a new artists’ book related to the issues that prompted that term 'anthropocene.'
"When I thought of a sea level rise of two hundred feet and what that could mean in terms of our cities and our society, the future seemed incredibly bleak. For the landscapes in the book, I decided to create a dystopian set of images that hinted at a future watery world, one where the remnants of civilizations lived in armed and guarded towers, growing their food in vertical farms inside these towers. The rest of the world population would have mostly died off. Marauding remnants exist in small groups that would try to gain entrance into these armed tower structures. The backgrounds of these images were built using scans of steel engravings from several 19th century books. I used photos of water and waves to make the foregrounds. … The goal was to create a series of images of a forbidding and lonely watery world, one that was austerely beautiful but scary and thought-provoking.
"About two years ago I read an online article by Sarah Zhang, entitled 'The "Harvard Sentences" Secretly Shaped the Development of Audio Tech.' The article was about a fascinating subject, the creation of a series of text lines that were used to test the fidelity of spoken words when broadcast over military and civilian radio transmitters. What ended up being 720 lines of text started as a series of short sentences that were meant to test the accuracy of military communication systems towards the end of the Second World War. … What I found especially interesting about these 720 sentences –72 lists of ten sentences each– is that they are mysteriously poetic and timeless. But they can also be thought of as metaphor for determining (or not) meaning from the static, transmitted signal from noise. We, as the populations and governments of planet earth, certainly have not yet registered the dire warning message of global warming.
"For the duotone pages I used two sets of images. For the blue background, I used Google earth satellite views of water and shorelines, printed in that deep blue Pantone color. NOAA images of maritime depth charts were used for the silver depth numbers and contour lines. Editing and selecting the Harvard Sentences was a great deal of fun. There were so many that I felt had poetic resonance with the subject matter, starting with the initial text line, 'There is a lag between thought and action' which seemed the perfect way of describing where we as earthlings are in regards to climate change." - Philip Zimmermann
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Homilies for the 99% or the Resurrection and Resurgence of Horatio Alger
Aileen Bassis
This work was made to accompany an exhibit curated by Aileen Bassis in 2016 at Westbeth Gallery in New York City about income inequality. "This group of work references 19th century author Horatio Alger. His enormously popular books stressed the notion that hard work and honesty will enable individuals to rise out of poverty and find financial security." - Aileen Bassis. "A homily is a moral lesson, often a platitude that favors broad brushstrokes of generalities over complex and subtle examination of issues. The aspect of homilies in this work is derived from the literature of Horatio Alger, a writer from the 19th century. He wrote enormously popular books for young adults that stressed simple moral virtues such as honesty and hard work as the means to climb from poverty to financial security. People were reading these during the Depression. These ideas are still floating around and used to blame people for their poverty rather than blame institutional forces. This work combines images and text from Horatio Alger novels with urban street imagery to make prints with mixed media." - Aileen Bassis.
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Legal Cuban Cigar
Clifton Meador
"The American government has had a fraught relationship with Cuba since the Cuban revolution of 1959. Received imagination portrays Havana as a mobster's playground before the revolution — a glittering city of nightclubs and casinos — but after the revolution? We mostly imagine a country of impoverished farmers, a nation with an excellent national health care system, a place of high literacy, a former client state of the Soviet Union, and home to the finest cigars in the entire world.
"The American relationship with Cuba turned sour when Castro finally revealed that Cuba was, in fact, a Marxist, socialist country aligned with the Soviet Union. The failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion attempt, President Kennedy's embargo, and the subsequent Cuban missile crisis were media events played out on television and in newspapers, perhaps the first media-driven international crisis. This mediated spectacle created a 50-year estrangement between Cuba and America that only began to thaw with President Obama's efforts.
"I traveled in Cuba in the fall of 2015, right after the renewal of diplomatic relations between the US and Cuba. One of the places I visited was the tobacco-growing region around Viñales. I thought about the irony in the stereotypical fetishization of Cuban cigars by businessmen, a fascination with cigars grown and produced in an impoverished communist country.
"The media circus surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis; a horseback ride to a tobacco barn; my first Cuban Cigar." — Clifton Meador
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Day and Fog
Mado Reznik
Theresienstadt, a concentration camp established by the SS during WWII near the city of Terezín in occupied Czechoslovakia, was the showplace camp gussied up by the Nazis after D-Day for a visit by Danish and International Red Cross officials. The intent was to dispel notions of exterminations camps. This work commemorates the artist's recent visit to what remains of the camp.
"day and fog is part of a journey taken several years ago. It comes from a survey about the Terezín ghetto in the Czech Republic, where art was legally promoted by Nazis but also [pursued] illegally by the prisoners. Terezín was the chosen ghetto to be shown by the Nazis as a tactic to oppose the world opinion about the horrendous and dreadful conditions of the camps. And, so to a certain extent art was promoted and even a huge library of more than 50,000 books was assembled. Both adults and children were involved in survival not only trying to get enough food and warmth but also literature, visual arts, music, theater, philosophy.
"My own personal pictures taken at the ghetto have been transformed into photo etchings. Paper rolls intend to express what we remember but sometimes tend to ignore as if meaning has been compartmentalized. Poems express part of the story in a voice that transcends my own voice. I have chosen different types of paper for that objective: Japanese, Mexican, and Nepal." — Mado Reznik
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The Boys & Bubs: Daddy & Papa
Benjamin D. Rinehart
"This lift-the-flap book details the journey of two individuals who met in New York City and eventually moved to Appleton, Wisconsin to start a family. Each page has multiple tabs that reveal the narrative." - Rinehart
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The Boys & Bubs: Seasons of Change
Benjamin D. Rinehart
"The USA offers a diverse range of scenery and opportunities with the change of the seasons. Swimming, climbing trees, playgrounds, gardening, riding bikes, bon fires, pumpkin and apple picking, sledding, and snow ball fights are just a few things that come to mind. My family is no different than many others when it comes to enjoying the great outdoors." - Rinehart
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Transforming Hate: An Artist's Book
Clarissa Sligh
"I am a black woman. I am an artist. For many years I have been creating work to bring issues of social justice into the public discourse. This book evolved from a project for which I folded origami cranes from pages of white supremacist books for the exhibition, Speaking Volumes: Transforming Hate. It was organized by the Montana Human Rights Network and the Holter Art Museum in Helena, Montana and opened in 2008. In 'Transforming Hate: An Artist’s Book,' I was trying to look at what it was like for me to turn the hateful words of the white supremacist books into a beautiful art object. That exploration helped me understand more fully the many levels of oppression and violence at the intersections of race, gender, class and sexual orientation. Why do we keep each other from being who we really are? How can we begin to talk about what separates us? In our roles, as voyeur and as participant, we make daily decisions about who gets to have rights and who is marginalized in our society. I ask us to question our perceptions about history, reality, identity and voice. Do we have the courage to live differently?" - Clarissa Sligh
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Dear Daughter
Cristina Tran
A series of letters by Christina Tran to the author’s future daughter juxtaposed against photos of their late mother. They are about our worth in the world, fighting the good fight, and always trusting in your own spirit – always.
"This book collects letters to my future daughter from the 'Dear Daughter' series (which can be seen at instagram.com/dear_daughter_)." — Cristina Tran
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In My Country
Aileen Bassis
"This book grew out of some earlier work about the immigrant experience. I asked immigrants what they missed about their lives in their native countries and used their replies in combination with prints from photos that I took in urban areas of northern New Jersey and New York City." - Aileen Bassis
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Buddha's Tears
Wei Jane Chir
Buddha’s Tears exposes the hidden story of organ harvesting in China from prisoners of conscience, such as Falun Gong practitioners. Statistical information is juxtaposed with poetic rendering of a legend of a statue of Buddha, who weeps in times of crisis. Each page is filled with dates, graphs, maps, drawings and stories, concluding with a sutured image of China, a symbol of healing. The accordion pages unravel to form a long scroll, a traditional form of Chinese storytelling, to lay out the facts of China’s cruelty.
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Made Up
Ellen Knudson
"Made Up is a non-scientific science book about the imaginary cellular composition of the human body. Fourteen cells are illustrated:
"Anger, Curiosity, Failure, Fear, Jealousy, Joy, Knowledge, Location, Love, The Past, Success, Talent, Trust, Work.
"The cell images are vibrant multi-block and reduction linoleum prints with a diagram explaining how each cell operates. The text is playfully pseudo-scientific and presents theories about the attributes that 'make up' a person.
"The inspiration for Made Up stems from a general fascination with how things are constructed. I often think about how people are similar and how we are different, and wonder how those similarities and differences occur. I had been drawing cells in my sketchbook and formed the idea of imaginary, emotional cellular structures that might 'make up' a person. I listed fourteen types of cells (Anger, Curiosity, etc) and wrote text for each cell using indirectly scientific language. To further support the pseudo-scientific nature of the books' content, I used a non-digital form of image creation for the cells — multi-block linoleum cuts." — Ellen Knudson
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Natural / Un-Natural
Thomas Parker Williams
"Prints of twenty-four painted panels, executed with dry pigments in alkyd medium, represent events affecting our environment and actions exacerbating these events. Each panel is divided into two sections to give two possible visual interpretations. Events described by the panels are: extra-terrestrial impacts, solar storms, volcanic activity, eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, wind, dust storms, rain, flooding, hurricanes, storm surges, tornadoes, blizzards, drought, wildfires, earth shifting events, glacier melting and calving, permafrost melting, and sea level rise. The climate is changing, we cannot control the events that threaten our environment but we could have controlled our actions. Now we may be powerless to stop this process." - Thomas Parker Williams
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Orientation Cube
Islam Aly
"Orientation Cube is inspired by The Kaaba, a cuboid building at the center of Islam's most sacred mosque, in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. It is the most sacred point within this most sacred mosque, making it the most sacred location in Islam. Wherever they are in the world, Muslims are expected to face the Kaaba when performing prayers. In addition one of the Five Pillars of Islam, every Muslim is required to perform the hajj pilgrimage at least once in his or her lifetime, if one is able. Multiple parts of the hajj require pilgrims to make circumambulation seven times around the Kaaba. A tiny black cube is positioned at the center of the inner back board, around which are concentric circles cut in the thirty sections of the book to reflect the process of circumambulation." - Islam Aly
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The Weekly Rituals of a Domestic Goddess
Maryann Riker
"In the weekly schedule of the post-World War II American housewife, a strict regimen of daily activities ruled her life. This ensured a clean and organized home that was the foundation of a happy husband and clean and healthy children. (Or at least, that is what the advertising images promised.) Enjoy this small tome as a celebration of time-honored weekly rituals for domestic goddesses that many women followed to keep a well-organized home! A fun little tome that is based on my mother and aunt's rituals for their weekly chores. It never ceased to amaze me how strictly they adhered to this as well as to their friends and neighbors. It was an unwritten code that Mondays were wash day, Tuesday, ironing, etc. Sundays were reserved for church, visiting, long Sunday drives or just relaxing...and, I couldn't find many images of women relaxing! Imagine that...” - Maryann Riker
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Never Flinch: A Visual Journal
Rachel Marie Simmons
"Never Flinch is an autobiographical visual journal that I published as a print on demand book through in 2014. A visual journal is a marriage of writing and art; a playground for a busy, creative mind; an amplification of your inner voice; a record of your experiences; a regular meeting over coffee between you and yourself. Through a rich layering of mixed media drawing, printmaking and collage, this self-reflective journal immerses the reader in a colorful narrative about life, art, science, travel and family. In my journal practice, I use a wide variety of materials and techniques. I write the text using a stream of consciousness, timed writing approach, and then visualize the writing through collage, image transfers, wax resist, linoleum prints, ink wash, acrylic, watercolor, drawing and erasure poetry." - Rachel Marie Simmons
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Pist Protta 75
Space Poetry
This time, the editors have been working with scissors and knives themselves - and under the influence of the general dystopia of the outside world, it has become a veritable do-it-yourself disaster.
No text except in the press release, which includes an extract from a hitherto unpublished conversation between Gordon Matta-Clark and Michael Crichton from around 1973. The conversation has been translated by Jacob Lillemose.
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52
Karen Zimmermann
"52 Fifty-two (52) is a book created to define my identity through places, people, personal and historical events within a book structure. On the year of my fifty-second birthday I found myself with a group of friends exploring Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty in Utah. We each made a pact to make a book. I decided, that the book would be about where I was and where I had been. I also reflected on the significance of the number (52) and its implications. It is a narrative as the book is sequenced through the years. All family lineage is broken and the percents are touched upon as my daughter could be 52/48% Caucasian/Nuxalk (a North West Canadian Aboriginal group). This measuring, like counting, is abstract. How I deal with the subject is through an abstract narrative using collage, also a metaphor for so many countless things." — Karen Zimmermann
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Why You Can’t Get Married: An Unwedding Album
Nava Atlas
"This limited edition artist’s book examines the issue of same-sex marriage through the lens of the past. The very arguments used to oppose interracial marriage in generations past have been recycled for use against same-sex marriage. Comparing state codes, legal opinions, public hearings, and political pronouncements, it becomes apparent that the arguments aren’t just similar, but nearly identical. The book ends with Mildred Loving’s statement on the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Supreme Court decision, Loving vs. Virginia, which legalized interracial marriage in all fifty states. She stated in part, 'I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sexual orientation, should have [the] freedom to marry.' The Unwedding Album’s prettiness stands in stark contrast to the ugliness of the language of bias framed within, a reminder that there’s still a way to go to before the right to marry by same-sex couples is a given. As even in the wake of the 2015 Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage in all fifty states, continued efforts to roll it back with 'religious freedom' laws make it clear that universal acceptance is not yet at hand." - Nava Atlas